In March 2006, Amy Winehouse walked into producer Mark Ronson’s studio on Mercer Street in New York, and told him she’d expected “some old guy with a beard, like Rick Rubin.” Winehouse and Ronson shared a publishing company, which had prompted the meeting. Neither had any idea it would produce one of the defining songs of the decade.
Ronson had nothing prepared to play her. Instead, the pair talked music. Winehouse told him about going out to bars and clubs, playing snooker with her boyfriend, and listening obsessively to 1960s girl groups, particularly The Shangri-Las. She played him some of those records there and then, giving Ronson what he later called a “crash course in girl-group production.”
Ronson told her he had nothing ready, but asked her to come back the next day and let him work on something overnight. That night, he wrote a small piano riff that would become the verse chords to ‘Back to Black’, building it up with a kick drum, a tambourine, and “tons of reverb.” Winehouse returned the following day, approved of what she heard, and ended up staying in New York for two weeks. Together, the pair wrote five or six songs.
The Shangri-Las’ ‘Remember (Walking in the Sand)’ became the single biggest influence on the finished track, Ronson has said. It fit a broader shift in Winehouse’s writing. “I’m not a jazz girl any more,” she told The Sun that year, explaining her move away from the influences on her 2003 debut, Frank. “I’ve been listening to ’60s bands and girl groups, and it came out in the writing on Back to Black.”
Not every idea was an easy sell. Winehouse was famously resistant to orchestral strings, telling Ronson bluntly: “I don’t want any f*cking strings on the record.” Ronson brought in arranger Chris Elliot regardless, working on the additions while Winehouse wasn’t in the room. When she finally heard the finished mix, with her head down on the desk according to Elliot, she looked up and, to the relief of everyone involved, said simply: “OK, you can leave it in.”
The same New York sessions also produced ‘Rehab’. According to Winehouse’s father Mitch’s 2012 memoir, Amy, My Daughter, the song’s famous hook came to her on a walk around the block with Ronson, after she’d popped out to buy her then-boyfriend Alex Clare a present.
‘Back to Black’ was released as a single in April 2007, but its afterlife proved far longer than anyone could have predicted. Following Winehouse’s death in July 2011, aged just 27, the song re-entered the UK top ten, becoming the most successful of her posthumous releases. What began as an overnight piano riff, written to soundtrack a break-up, became instead the song most closely associated with her entire career.
